This tutorial will teach you to create nice glow effect that adds ‘dreamy’ look to your images. You may use this technique both for color and B/W images.

Duplicate the background. Press CTRL-J to make copy of the ‘Background’ layer. Rename new layer to ‘glow – temp’. This layer will be used as temporary layer to create glow effect. It will be deleted later.

Use ‘Levels’ to lighten the image.Press CTRL-L to adjust levels. Increase ‘gamma’ setting. You may also move white slider to the left to get more highlights (this will increase ‘dreamy’ effect).

Click to see image with selection.

Select highlighted areas of the image. It’s a bit ‘tricky’ part. Go to the Channels palette and click ‘Load channel as selection’. This creates a selection that contains mostly highlighted ares of your image. Darker areas will be affected by selection less.

Duplicate ‘glow-temp’ layer. Go back to Layers palette. Press CTRL-J to duplicate ‘temp’ layer. Only selected areas will be copied to the new layer.Rename new layer to ‘Glow’. Set it’s blending mode to Lighten.